Keene has made millions influence peddling in Washington.

Hopefully, this will cost him his leadership position in the ACU.

What is the productive economic value of an Islamic madrasah, a Hindu ashram, or a Talmudic schul? Or, for that matter, a Protestant or Catholic seminary? In all such institutions, there is undoubtedly education taking place.

But does any of that learning equip the matriculant to go out into the commercial world and perform services or create goods that other people are willing to buy? The market for witch-doctors and priests and mullahs and similar boojum-peddlers gets saturated damned fast.

The truth of the matter is that government education bureaucrats – the members of the various teachers' unions, whether they're actual classroom pedagogues or just bureaucrats without direct instructional function – do not do an effective job in imparting skills to their pupils, particularly considering the exorbitant cost per pupil per year in virtually every American school district.

Moreover, such skills as these educationalists strive to impart to their students are not marketable skills. More horrible still, the majority of undergraduate and graduate degree programs operating produce people whose academic concentrations are in areas which are of just about precisely the same economic value of the people to come out of school as experts in the Qu'ran, the Torah, or Dungeons & Dragons.

Well, not quite. A lot of D&D experts have some potential future in games design.

Economist Thomas Sowell some years ago voiced the distinguishing characteristics of economically successful families and ethnic groups in cultures all over the world. They are three:

1) They work very hard, their purpose being to make money by providing goods and services for which other people are willing to pay.

2) They save as much money as they can, so as to create capital upon which they can draw for future actions.

3) They study – or support their children in school – to gain marketable skills.

That's it. Education AS SUCH can serve no purpose if it is not undertaken to acquire economically valuable skills. Mr. Soetoro's encouragement of community college study programs – most of them concentrating on what will inevitably be the “squishy” subjects, aptitudes in which do not contribute to the matriculants' productivity in later years – is a bucket of bilge.

But, that's true of bloody everything Mr. Soetoro espouses, isn't it?

This is what is wrong with our country, it is all about the money all the time. We bailed out the banking industry while business were starved for capital. Now the banking industry is making record profits, providing record payments to lobbyist while small business across america is failing every day.

Please remember friends we voted for this, Mr McCain told us the key to recover was small business during the election and Mr Obama said the key was to get banks, green power, and health care reform.

Friends we did this to ourselves, we can not blame Mr Obama he told us what he would do, and he is doing it. Elections are important.